Running a successful cleaning business does not make for an easy week. For Rich
Mason, it’s a matter of a having the right set of tools: great customer service, a quality
product and a strong worth ethic.
It helps to have a talent with another kind of tools, as well, since equipment
maintenance and repair is vital to the lifeline of any cleaning business.
During any given hour at his Mason Cleaners plant in Dumont, NJ, Rich may be called upon to utilize any and all of the
aforementioned skills, sometimes simultaneously.
In fact, a simple undertaking like, say, an interview with a trade publication,
becomes exponentially more complicated with each minute.
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While he spoke on the phone, he was also racing back and forth trying to solve a
missing clothes mystery, hire a prospective employee, and, though pressed
severely for time, made sure that one customer knew that it could cost a lot of
money to have a skirt’s zipper and lining repaired.
It would have been cheaper to buy a new one, he told her, but the lady was happy
to pay the money as the skirt clearly held a special place in her heart.
The entire time of his interview, Rich moved at a breakneck speed, only applying
the brakes when he wanted to emphasize a special point or give a customer a
little extra attention.
Ironically, Rick picked the interview time specifically because he considered it
to be a “slow” time at his plant.
Slow is not a word that readily comes to mind to describe Rich, who loves to
race down the road on his Harley Davidson Ultra Classic (fully decked out with
a windshield, saddlebags and cruise control) any chance he gets.
Being a cleaner does not afford him as much time as he’d prefer to pursue his hobby, so sometimes he has to combine the two.
Such was the case in 2003 and 2007 when Rich organized motorcycle runs in Las
Vegas for cleaners attending the Clean Show.
During the first run, Rich and 15 other motorcycle lovers endured 125-degree
temperatures in the Nevada desert as they visited Red Rocks National Park and
Toiyabe National Forest before heading back to the Strip in Vegas around
midnight.
“It was pretty cool coming in out of the mountains and seeing the entire desert
floor covered in lights,” Rich recalled. “It was like coming in from an airplane. You’ve got to be a good 150 to 200 feet up when you’re coming down the mountain with the whole valley laid down in front of you. It’s gorgeous. It’s like looking down at the stars.”
The run at last year’s Clean Show was less populated, but no less fun. Rich did not know he would be
able to participate in it until the last minute, so there was little time for
advance notice for the ride. Still, any chance to get out of the plant and onto
the highway is always a welcome respite from the chaos of his day-to-day work.
Initially, Rich did not have any interest in being a cleaner though his father,
Peter, had originally opened up Mason Cleaners back in 1948.
“He was in the Navy during World War II and he had aspirations of becoming a
photographer,” Rich said. “Until he could get his photography career up and running, he had to work for his
uncle who had a cleaners. Then, he opened his own a year or so later.”
The company remained at the same location in West New York, NJ, until it moved
to Dumont in 1962. Rich was born three years later, and, when he was old enough
to ride a bicycle, he’d visit his father after school.
“He let me work the counter once in a while, making change for people, or I’d sit in the back and put struts onto hangers. He’d pay me a penny a piece. That was big money back then,” Rich laughed.
When Rich entered high school, he stopped helping out around the plant and
worked just about everywhere else after school: making dough at a pizza place,
washing dishes at a restaurant, selling shoes at a retail store and even a
little cooking.
Then, during his senior year he worked part-time as an auto mechanic and knew
exactly what he wanted to do for a living.
“That actually lead me to go to the Lincoln Technical Institute for Automotive
Technology,” he said. “I went to school, graduated and became a certified auto mechanic.”
One job was simply not enough for Rich in the mid-1980s. He preferred to work at
an auto shop all day, then he’d head over to the auto department at Sears for the night shift. He enjoyed the
work and picked up a ton of experience, but he did run into one problem with
his job.
“As an auto mechanic, you actually have to buy your own tools,” he noted. “Some of the specialty tools, the shops that you work for will provide for you,
but things like wrenches, sockets, impact guns and that kind of stuff, you have
to buy yourself.”
Rich ended up funneling most of his earnings back into a professional
investment.
“Every week I had to buy another tool to add to my set. I was always paying the
tool man and I was getting a little sick of it,” he admitted.
Like his father had before him, Rich decided to work at the family cleaning
business while he figured out what he wanted to do. As it turned out, he had
already discovered it.
After he started with Mason Cleaners in 1987, Rich’s father wasted no time in giving him advice on being a good cleaner.
“He always said, ‘If you’re going to be in this business, learn everything. You don’t want to be beholden to any of your employees’,” Rich recalled.
So, Rich started picking up all the tools of the trade. Fortunately, he already
possessed some of them. His mechanic skills have come in handy quite often,
helping him perform about 80 to 90 percent of the cleaning equipment repair and
maintenance.
Other battles, however, were more difficult to fight. One of the biggest came in
1992 when Mason Cleaners had to move locations in a mad rush.
The Masons were never given the option of a lease on their property. Then,
without notice, the real estate went up for sale. The price was too high for
Rich and his dad to consider.
“There was a piece of property next door that had an abandoned deli in it,” Rich said. “My dad purchased the property, tore down the building, and started building a
new plant because he saw that the writing was on the wall. Before we could
finish the building, she found a buyer. At the beginning of May, we received a
letter saying to be out in 30 days.”
They were still many months away from the new building being complete.
“So, we went to court,” Rich recalled. “The judge said, ‘Listen, what she’s doing is wrong, but legally, I can’t stop this so you have to get out.’”
After that, Rich thought they still had a month to move. A week later the
sheriff’s department showed up to close them down.
“This was prom weekend,” Rich added. “We had prom gowns and all kinds of stuff going on and here we are wondering what
we’re going to do.”
After quick negotiations, they were allowed to “yank as much stuff” out as they could in one day. They tore right through everything, removing the
large equipment connected to pipes with blowtorches and saws.
Fortunately, the Masons had a lot of town councilmen (who were also customers)
on their side. They were allowed to keep operating in crazy conditions, storing
clothes in big trailers and farming out the work to another cleaners.
“Customers were literally walking across planks to come to the counter that we
dragged out of our unfinished building every day to take clothes in from them.
We were like a drop store out on the sidewalk for three months.”
It’s a good idea to have friends around when hard times hit. It helped Rich through
the painful move, and it is important now that the New Jersey DEP has proposed
to ban perc cleaning by the end of 2020. Rich, who has been president of NCA’s New Jersey chapter for almost a decade, believes the proposed rules are
unjust.
“It’s very unfair to the people who, like myself, took a proactive approach to their
business,” he said. “I bought a fourth generation machine at a time I could have run a third
generation indefinitely. I wasn’t required to, but I spent the extra $7,000 and put the carbon absorber on there
to make sure I was ahead of the curve.
“Well, now they are saying that even though you’ve spent all that extra money and you’re in compliance and you’ve never had a fine and passed every inspection — their proposal still says, ‘Sorry, you still have to get rid of your machine.’”
When drycleaners gathered in Trenton, Rich was among them.
“One of the things that I pointed out to the DEP was that, as an industry, we
have policed ourselves,” he noted.
Rich uses his own history as an example. When he joined up in the late 1980s,
Mason Cleaners purchased about 250 gallons of perc every one to two months.
These days, the cleaners use only 75 to 100 gallons per year.
Regardless of what happens with the proposed rules, Rich has some good advice
for the industry.
“Cleaners need to charge the appropriate price for their service, not just so
they have money in their pocket at the end of the week, but also so they could
have money set aside for future equipment replacements so it doesn’t become the most devastating thing to their business,” he explained.
